Tag Archives: Wealth

Believe it or not, today’s video deals with a surprisingly persistent piece of conventional wisdom. I honestly couldn’t tell you where I picked it up, maybe Niall Ferguson, but it’s something I unthinkingly believed for decades. The idea is that countries that were colonized by the British were better off than those colonized by the French, because of superior British institutions, or better management or whatever. I hardly thought about this old assumption in my two years researching the British Empire. Serious books of history don’t try to make this claim. But once the vids started coming out, it started cropping up in the comments.

This is one of the most fun things about studying history. If you build up a base of knowledge, you can occasionally get these sudden “Ah-Hah!” moments when you realize that something you’ve always believed is unmitigated balderdash. Today’s video wrote itself with very little prompting. If you have a cursory knowledge of the history of the countries in each of the Empires before and after colonization, it becomes clear how silly this old story is. And with this video, I get to make it clear to everybody else too… I love my job.

I occasionally enjoy running one of these snippets, and you may see more of them. Once a month I do a live chat that ends with a lengthy Q & A. Occasionally I like one of my answers enough that I think it deserves being re-cut into its own video. This is probably the least articulate of the videos I have done this with, but I think the anger is appropriate, and I think the necessary point is completely made. What do you think of these sorts of videos? Fun to surface them, or best to leave well enough alone?